The Sport That Packed Stadiums Without Paying the People Who Filled Them

Every fall Saturday, there are college stadiums across the US that pack in more than a hundred thousand people to watch eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-olds play. A lot of those towns don't have a pro team anywhere nearby, so the college team is simply the biggest sporting event of the year, with entire generations of the same family following it. The rivalries have been going strong for over a century, and the whole Saturday ritual, tailgating in the stadium parking lot for hours before kickoff, is almost as big a deal as the game itself.

Throughout all that long history, one rule never changed: players couldn't earn a single dollar off their own fame, no matter how many people were packing that stadium because of them. That, until very recently, changed completely. Today there's something called NIL, which in practice means this: a college athlete can get paid for their own personal brand. Signing an ad deal, selling their own merch, getting paid for social media posts, whatever it is. Before 2021, none of that was allowed. Let's look at how we got here.

The cracks that were already showing before everything broke

Long before the system changed for good, there were already signs the old rule couldn't hold up against reality. Reggie Bush won the Heisman Trophy (college football's top individual award) in 2005, and in 2010 had to give it back after it came out that he and his family had accepted cash, trips, and a free house from people hoping to represent him down the road. Johnny Manziel, another Heisman winner, got investigated for getting paid to sign autographs, something that's completely normal and legal today. For years, the rule kept punishing things that, looking back now, seem almost absurd to have chased after.

The perfect symbol of what was really going on

For more than a decade, EA Sports made college football and basketball video games with players who looked exactly like the real stars, same jersey number, same height, same playing style, just no name attached. That was how they got around the legal problem of using someone's likeness without paying them a dime.

The guy who blew this open was Ed O'Bannon, a former UCLA basketball player who one day found out a family friend was playing as a character that was obviously him, no permission asked, nothing. He sued, won, and the NCAA ended up paying out $40 million split among thousands of former players. The video game got shelved in 2013 because of the legal mess. It came back in 2024, under the new rules, paying $600 to each of the roughly 11,000 players who appear in it, this time with their real names on.

From scraping by to buying a Lamborghini

Before July 2021, the only thing an athlete could get from their school was a scholarship and a small monthly stipend, a few hundred bucks, with no allowance to work during the school year. Former Georgia quarterback Carson Beck put it simply in an interview: his first three years of college, that small monthly stipend was it. In 2024, he bought a Lamborghini worth over $270,000 with money he was now able to earn off his own image. Same guy, two completely different financial realities, just a few years apart.

Who's actually putting up the money

This is the part worth really understanding, because the money doesn't come from just one place, it comes from three very different sources.

The first is brands. A car company, a restaurant chain, a sportswear brand, paying an athlete directly to show up in an ad or promote their product. This is a completely normal sponsorship, same as with any professional athlete, and it's been legal since July 2021.

The second is what's called collectives, and here's the nuance a lot of people don't quite get. These aren't a brand, and they're not the university either. They're groups of alumni, business owners, and fans tied to a specific school who pool money together with the goal of paying that school's athletes. It often gets dressed up as "sponsorship," but the real goal is almost always just attracting or keeping talent at their school. And honestly, there's something kind of great buried in this too: it shows just how much loyalty and love American alumni have for their old school, enough to put their own money on the line, years or even decades after graduating, just to keep their old team competitive.

And the third, the newest of all, since 2025, is schools paying their athletes directly out of their own athletic department budget, something that was completely banned until very recently. Each school can now distribute up to roughly $20 million a year across all its athletes.

The change that really lit the fuse: the Transfer Portal

There's one more piece to all this, and it's the one getting the most heat from coaches and longtime fans. It's called the Transfer Portal, and it's basically a database where a player can enter their name to signal they want to switch schools. It was created back in 2018 purely to add transparency to that process, nothing more.

The problem is that, combined with NIL money, it's turned into something close to a constant free-agent market, minus any of the rules a real pro league would have, like a cap on how many times you can switch teams, or a salary cap. In 2023 alone, more than 31,000 players entered the portal looking for a new team, and less than half of them actually landed one.

The criticism that keeps coming up, even from former players and longtime coaches, goes like this: players used to stick with the same school for four years, grow up with the same group of teammates, and that built programs with a real identity over time. Now, with players able to switch schools almost every season chasing the best paycheck, a lot of people feel that long-term sense of a program is disappearing, and that college sports are starting to look more and more like an out-of-control version of the pro market, minus any of the structure that keeps the pros in order.

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